Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Engelbrecht on Offer

Oops! I haven't updated my blog for 10 days. How indolent of me! I did plan to write about our recent camping trip, my first of 2012, but somehow I never got round to it. Frazzled by the sun in the day; frozen and sandblasted by the wind at night beneath the amazingly bright stars; scrambling over rocks to get around a headland before the tide came in; the rescue of two brittlestars and a crab (Adele did that); the call of a chough, rarest of the corvids; the discovery of a Roman silver mine; feet as sore as an angry bear's bonce...

Instead I'm going to take the opportunity of pointing out that my novel Engelbrecht Again! is on special offer. Reduced by 40% from $50 to $30. Check out the publisher's website for more details. This was the first novel I ever wrote and has an extremely tortuous history. Completed in the summer of the year 2000, it was subsequently accepted by no less than four different publishers, all of whom defaulted for one reason or another, until Dead Letter Press heroically issued it in 2008. There's also a special offer on another Dead Letter Press volume, a massive anthology called Bound for Evil, themed around 'weird' books: take it from me, that's a hell of a tome!

I suppose crabs do look quite evil... and yet I can't bring myself to hate them too much.

When I was in Infants School many many many years ago, we had a teacher called Miss Sparks who did 'Nature' (she was one of the nicest teachers there actually)... She asked everyone to bring into school something to do with nature; so lots of people brought in flowers, leaves, etc... But one kid brought in a lice crab, a big one too...

Anyway, she put it in a box and somehow it climbed out and did a runner! Nobody noticed this until halfway through the lesson. So we all ran out of the classroom to look for it and it had managed to get almost to the end of the long corridor that led to the main exit. It was literally about half a metre away from freedom when it was recaptured. I have always admired the heroism of that would-be escapee...